Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #1)

by Stephen Fry

Ares – MARS to the Romans – was unintelligent of course, monumentally dense and unimaginative for, as everyone knows, war is stupid.

As for Hera – rather than acknowledge that she had been paid back for her cruel and unnatural betrayal of the maternal instinct, she maintained a dignified and frosty silence. Secretly the better part of her was rather proud of her elder boy, and in time she grew genuinely fond of him, as did all Olympus.

Many plates were broken in ecstasy, a tradition that is carried on to this day wherever Greeks gather to eat, celebrate and earn tourist money.

In the beginning was Chaos. Out of Chaos came the First Order – Erebus, Nyx, Hemera and their generation – followed by the Second Order, our grandparents Gaia and Ouranos, yes?’

Here Phaeton lies who in the sun-god’s chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.

The work completed, Cadmus and Harmonia turned to the matter of their marriage. Descended from Titans and gods, allied to and punished by Olympians, but very mortal and very human, the pair might nowadays be called an ‘iconic power couple’. Today’s press and social media, one suspects, would hardly be able to resist dubbing them ‘Cadmonia’.

After a banquet in Dionysus’s honour Staphylus died of the first fatal hangover. As compensation, and in their honour, Dionysus named bunches of grapes staphylos, alcoholic liquid and drunkenness methe and the grape itself botrys. Science has taken these names and immortalized them in a way that splendidly exemplifies the continuing relationship between Greek myth and our language. When nineteenth-century biologists looked down their microscopes and saw a bacterium with a tail, from which clusters of grape-like nodules sprouted, they called it Staphylococcus. ‘Methylated spirits’ and ‘methane’ take their names from Methe.